Scheduling "National Treasure 3" Is Its Own Adventure

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While "National Treasure 3" will bring the Disney action-team back together once again for box office domination, don't start lining up at the multiplex any time soon. Bringing the whole crew back together is going to take some time and planning.

Director Jon Turteltaub tells PopcornBiz that at this point they are waiting for the perfect screenplay "which has to be awesome at this point. At this point (the third movie), it cannot suck."

Then comes the work of bringing back the likes of Nic Cage (who also stars in Turteltaub's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" opening Friday), Jon Voight and Justin Bartha.

"So you finish the screenplay and Nic's not available this month, and then Justin Bartha's not available until this month," says Turteltaub. "Sometimes it just takes longer. Maybe by the time we do it there will be whole new treasures discovered. New relics to find."

Less pessimistically, NT3 should start filming towards the end of 2010 is slated to open sometime in 2011.

The film will call for yet another collaboration between Cage and Turteltaub, who actually took part in the same drama club together at Beverly Hills High School. Cage has talked ruefully about losing out to Turteltaub for the lead in the school production of "Our Town." In truth there were no hard feelings.

"He forgave me in about an hour," says Turteltaub, speaking while hosting a fundraising event for Creative Visions Foundation (which raised 150,000 to build an entire school in Africa).

Rather than an acting rivalry, Turteltaub instead focused on the one high school production that truly brought out the star power: "Oklahoma!" Cage was sinister farm hand Jud Frye and Turteltaub was cowboy Will Parker.

"Imagine that, it was Nic Cage, myself and Lenny Kravitz was the drummer in the school orchestra," he laughs. "That's Beverly Hills High School."